


Experience

by businessghost



Category: Original Work
Genre: Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Meta, One Shot, Recreational Drug Use, kind of a descriptive experiment, teenage experience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 21:43:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7239673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/businessghost/pseuds/businessghost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Really just my musings on the teenage experience and what it's like. Lots of descriptions and very little story. And yes, it is a bit of a confessional.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Experience

I don't know what makes the teenage experience. I know it's beautiful, it's dangerous, it's reckless, it's joyous. But I still do not know it.

I think it's pressing close together in a bathroom, sucking hickeys onto her skin, cheap cinnamon whiskey on your tongue. It's hearing your peers chant "Shots! Shots! Shots!" over again, and drowning them out with her quiet gasps. Taking a pipe from another girl, 8th in your class of 650, and lighting it up with the salutatorian's BIC. Blowing smoke gently into your girlfriend's mouth, breathing in the scent, smelling the burning sage and the freedom. Clinking plastic red cups and downing the rum or vodka or cough syrup or whatever these desperate animals came up with inside. Wobbling to your friend's car, slurring into your phone at the friends you didn't see in the herd of partiers, praying that the one hit your designated driver took won't affect her too much, because you can't even see straight, let alone walk a straight line.

I think it's going to graduation, watching your friends walk. Picking out the graduates who got fucked up before coming. There: she's messed up on coccaine, and you know  _he's_ hiding a flask in his pocket. Crying and cheering and applauding when your friends get called, even when their names get fumbled over by adults who could care less. Willing the parents in the stands to stay silent when they mention the classmates who died. You're not sure you ever knew them. Holding your own grade a little closer. You'll be leaving each other sooner than you could've imagined.

I think it's stolling with a friend on a warm summer night. He dropped out. This is the same boy who used to play the clarinet beautifully, who used to argue in class about the victims of the U.S. prison system. This is the same boy whose arms you've nervously scrutinized for track marks. They're not there tonight, anyway. You walk down the streets you run with the cross country team. You marvel at how differently your lives have turned out. Furtively, you sneak past your high school to the baseball diamond. Sitting on the concrete bleachers that radiate an impossible heat under the stars, you pass him your glass pipe. You breathe out smoke to the heavens, and stay silent for once. The two of you amble aimlessly around the suburban neighborhood that feeds the school. You buy icecream at a fast food chain and greet your hungover friends working jobs at nearby grocery stores. Let the drugs wash you out. You find a swing set, and rock slowly under the night sky. He knows a lot about constellations and myths, and you squint throught the light pollution, trying to make out the brightest star in Orion's bow.

I think that the teenage experience is looking at all your friends, and knowing that despite their vices, the real teenage experience isn't drugs and drinking and mall trips. It's staying up late, popping adderall to study for AP History, breaking down in the hallway and putting yourself back together in the 5-minute passing period, touching up your mascara in the bathroom mirror with graffitti scratched into its surface. It's embracing all of your fellow teenagers, because you're all just trying to survive this world, a world unlike it has ever been before. It's feeling proud when you look over at your class and you know, there's something that bonds you. And in a world that seems hell-bent on breaking everything apart, with politicians screaming out how different and separate we all are, that bond is beautiful. When you're young enough to believe in the possibility that it will get better, and you have enough drugs clouding your mind to make you forget everything that's already worn you down, that is the teenage experience. We are not invincible, we are unkillable. Immortals who bleed ichor and heal and rise gloriously again.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading this. it's pretty weird, i know.


End file.
